The Origins of `Open Source'

It was easy to see the outlines of the strategy. We needed to take
the pragmatic arguments I had pioneered in The Cathedral and the
Bazaar, develop them further, and push them hard, in public.
Because Netscape itself had an interest in convincing investors that
its strategy was not crazy, we could count on it to help the
promotion. We also recruited Tim O'Reilly (and through him, O'Reilly &
Associates) very early on.

The real conceptual breakthrough, though, was admitting to ourselves
that what we needed to mount was in effect a marketing
campaign—and that it would require marketing techniques
(spin, image-building, and rebranding) to make it work.

Hence the term `open source', which the first participants in what
would later become the Open Source campaign (and, eventually, the Open
Source Initiative organization) invented at a meeting held in Mountain
View the offices of VA Research on 3 February 1998.

It seemed clear to us in retrospect that the term `free software' had
done our movement tremendous damage over the years. Part of this
stemmed from the fact that the word `free' has two different meanings
in the English language, one suggesting a price of zero and one related
to the idea of liberty. Richard Stallman, whose Free Software
Foundation has long championed the term, says ``Think free speech,
not free beer'' but the ambiguity of the term has nevertheless created
serious problems—especially since most ``free software'' is also
distributed free of charge.

Most of the damage, though, came from something worse—the strong
association of the term `free software' with hostility to intellectual
property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear it
to an MIS manager.

It was, and still is, beside the point to argue that the Free
Software Foundation is not hostile to all intellectual property
and that its position is not exactly communistic. We knew that.
What we realized, under the pressure of the Netscape release, was
that FSF's actual position didn't matter. Only the fact that
its evangelism had backfired (associating `free software' with
these negative stereotypes in the minds of the trade press and the
corporate world) actually mattered.

Our success after Netscape would depend on replacing the
negative FSF stereotypes with positive
stereotypes of our own—pragmatic tales, sweet to managers' and
investors' ears, of higher reliability and lower cost and better
features.

In conventional marketing terms, our job was to rebrand the product,
and build its reputation into one the corporate world would hasten to
buy.

Linus Torvalds endorsed the idea the day after that first
meeting. We began acting on it within a few days after. Bruce Perens
had the <opensource.org> domain registered and the first
version of the Open Source
website up within a week. He also suggested that the Debian
Free Software Guidelines become the `Open Source
Definition', and began the process of registering `Open
Source' as a certification mark so that we could legally require
people to use `Open Source' for products conforming to the OSD.

Even the particular tactics needed to push the strategy seemed pretty
clear to me even at this early stage (and were explicitly discussed
at the initial meeting). Key themes:

1. Forget Bottom-Up; Work on Top-Down

One of the things that seemed clearest was that the historical Unix
strategy of bottom-up evangelism (relying on engineers to persuade
their bosses by rational argument) had been a failure. This was naive
and easily trumped by Microsoft. Further, the Netscape breakthrough
didn't happen that way. It happened because a strategic
decision-maker (Jim Barksdale) got the clue and then imposed that vision
on the people below him.

The conclusion was inescapable. Instead of working bottom-up,
we should be evangelizing top-down—making a direct effort to
capture the CEO/CTO/CIO types.

2. Linux is Our Best Demonstration Case

Promoting Linux must be our main thrust. Yes, there are other things
going on in the open-source world, and the campaign will bow
respectfully in their direction—but Linux started with the best
name recognition, the broadest software base, and the largest
developer community. If Linux can't consolidate the breakthrough,
nothing else will, pragmatically speaking, have a prayer.

3. Capture the Fortune 500

There are other market segment that spend more dollars (small
business and home office being the most obvious examples) but those
markets are diffuse and hard to address. The Fortune 500 doesn't
merely have lots of money, it concentrates lots
of money where it's relatively accessible. Therefore, the software
industry largely does what the Fortune 500 business market tells it to
do. And therefore, it is primarily the Fortune 500 we need to
convince.

4. Co-opt the Prestige Media that Serve the Fortune 500

The choice to target the Fortune 500 implies that we need to
capture the media that shape the climate of opinion among top-level
decision-makers and investors: very specifically, the New
York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
the Economist, Forbes, and
Barron's Magazine.

On this view, co-opting the technical trade press is necessary but not
sufficient; it's important essentially as a pre-condition for storming
Wall Street itself via the elite mainstream media.

5. Educate Hackers in Guerrilla Marketing Tactics

It was also clear that educating the hacker community itself would be
just as important as mainstream outreach. It would be insufficient
to have one or a handful of ambassadors speaking effective language
if, at the grass roots, most hackers were making arguments that didn't
work.

6. Use the Open Source Certification Mark to Keep Things Pure

One of the threats we faced was the possibility that the term
`open source' would be ``embraced and extended'' by Microsoft or other
large vendors, corrupting it and losing our message. It is for this
reason the Bruce Perens and I decided early on to register the term as
a certification mark and tie it to the Open Source Definition (a copy
of the Debian Free Software Guidelines). This would allow us to scare
off potential abusers with the threat of legal action.

It eventually developed that the U.S. Patent and Trademark office
would not issue a trademark for such a descriptive phrase.
Fortunately, by the time we had to write off the effort to formally
trademark "Open Source" a year later, the term had acquired its own
momentum in the press and elsewhere. The sorts of serious abuse we
feared have not (at least, not yet as of November 2000) actually
materialized.